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I am new to Docker and WSL2 but I was wondering why Hyper-V was required to get Docker Desktop for Windows to run in WSL2. It seems that the only Windows features I needed to get WSL2 up and running was “Windows Subsystem for Linux” and “Virtual Machine Platform”, but Docker for Windows won’t run without installing Hyper-V. Is there something I’m missing or is this a WSL1 requirement?
Thank you,
Eric
Docker Desktop (the standard edition) runs the containers in a virtual machine in Hyper-V. The combination of Docker Desktop with WSL2 is a new and still experimental technology. You need Desktop >= 2.1.5 from the edge channel together with Win 10 insider build >= 18980 to use it.
Thank you. I have a supported insider build with WSL2 running on it.
I’m guessing that the Docker Desktop application still requires the Hyper-V and Container Windows 10 features since WSL2 support is still in the experimental phase, I was just wondering if there are plans to remove the dependency on those Windows features since they technically aren’t required for WSL2.
After some experimentation, it looks like those Windows features can be removed once the Docker Desktop application is switched to WSL2 mode.
In this post on Docker Engineering the statement is clear: “We will replace the Hyper-V VM we currently use by a WSL 2 integration package.”
Thank you very much for your help. That clears things up for me.